After four years in Tokyo, working on various short-term contracts at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University, I am happy to announce that I have accepted a permanent position at the UCL Institute of Education (IoE) in London, UK. My new role is as a lecturer in education and international development, teaching in the Educational Planning, Economics and International Development Master’s program (or programme!). I will also be affiliated with the Centre for Education and International Development, or CEID. I’m thrilled to join this storied Institute!

The start of my career in London was marked by an eight day industrial action over pensions, pay, equality, and casualization. It was a strange way to begin to say the least. I had to cross the picket line on my first day of work in order to pick up my university ID and join the University and College Union (UCU), which then allowed me to actually go on strike. With those administrative particulars sorted, I immediately joined my new colleagues on the picket line, meeting people from across the Institute. Learning the ins-and-outs of the IoE through first hand accounts — as well as important history (one person I met was a student of Basil Bernstein!) — I received an amazing induction, what many of us began calling an ‘alternative’ induction to the one provided by UCL.

During the strike, I met people far beyond the IoE. During a march from UCL to Westminster Abbey, which linked-up with the Friday youth climate strike, I noticed David Graeber standing on the street. After calling out his name, he quickly joined me on the march where we walked and chatted together for the next 500 meters. We talked mainly about the up-coming UK election, and why the polls should not be believed.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, was on everyone’s mind during the strike and march. Little did I know that Corbyn would join the picket line the next week — and I would get to meet him. In the photo at left, I am standing behind Corbyn, holding up the banner he is admiring. To the right of Corbyn, you can see my head and gray hat sticking out slightly. Like I said, this was a very strange way to begin my career at the IoE. But if the first eight days are anything to go by, my new life at the IoE is going to be exciting and fruitful. I am looking forward to working with my new colleagues and many students over the next years and decades. If you are interested in studying with me at the IoE, please do get in touch.

Fatih Aktas and I published a new article in the International Journal of Comparative Education and Development entitled “All education for some? International development and shadow education in Cambodia.” In the piece, we argue that the education development agenda since the 1990s is partly to blame for the rise of shadow education in the country. We make this case through a comparison of two UNESCO reports, one from 1955 and one from the 2010. You can find the article here.

A new group called, Networking to Integrate SDG Target 4.7 and Social and Emotional Learning into Educational Materials (NISSEM), has just published a new book called NISSEM Global Briefs. It’s open access and can be downloaded here. In the book, my FreshEd interview with Aaron Benavot was turned into a chapter. Aaron dives into the history of SDG 4.7, giving valuable insight when thinking about the global indicator that is, at best, a bit messy. You can read the chapter here.

My latest chapter just came out in the book Transformation in Higher Education Governance in Asia, edited by Darryl Jarvis and Joshua Ka Ho Mok. Ho. My chapter uses the concepts of “global summitry” and “clientelism” to theorize higher education governance in Cambodia. After reviewing the history of higher education since the 1960s, I analyze the country’s experiences amid regional attempts to harmonize standards, degree structures, quality assurance systems, and credit systems in Southeast Asia. Rather than explicit intervention into Cambodia’s higher education sector, as has been historically common, I argue the contemporary order transmits policy and governance practices through various regional and international forums, creating a seemingly homogenous system of higher education. External influence through global summitry, however, must be paired with a recognition of the prevalence of clientelism. By exploring the case of the Accreditation Council of Cambodia, higher education governance is shown to reproduce the engrained system of clientelism, empowering elites and contributing further to systems of informal patronage. I conclude the chapter with recent (up to April 2016) developments in higher education governance, offering some observations and obstacles for future development in the sector.

My latest article was just published in the journal Globalisation, Societies, and Education. It’s entitled “Education’s big short: learning peonage in American universities.” Here is the abstract of the piece:

Some of the biggest debtors in the twenty-first century are not small business owners or first-time homeowners, but rather university students who take out massive debt in the belief that it is an investment in their future. Like housing loans before the Global Financial Crisis, student loan debt is today being packaged and re-packaged into exotic financial products called Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS). This article details the financialisation of higher education and the emergence of SLABS, primarily through a case study of Pine Capital, a wealth management company, that has successfully shorted the market. Using investment reports and Federal Reserve data from the USA, the article outlines the misaligned incentives and miscalculation of risk that allowed Pine Capital to profit. The article then argues that those who are shorting the education market reveal not only an investment opportunity but also a fundamental challenge to the commonplace thinking about education today: higher education is teaching future generations the practices of debt peonage, a key feature of financial capitalism.

I started to develop the idea for this paper in 2015 and eventually created a short podcast about the process of putting the article together. You can find the podcast here.

At the annual conference of the Comparative and International Education Society in San Francisco, I was honored to receive the 2019 Citizenship and Democratic Education Special Interest Group’s Emerging Scholar Award. The award “recognizes the outstanding contributions and future promise of emerging or early career scholars, who stand to positively impact the field of citizenship and democratic education around the world.” Thank you to all the members of the SIG. I am deeply humbled by this recognition.

The Routledge Handbook of NGOs and International Relations (edited by Thomas Davies) was published on April 4. Iveta Silova and I wrote a chapter on education entitled, “Five Generations of NGOs in Education: From Humanitarianism to Global Capitalism.” We spotlight two NGOs in education, the PAL Network and Education International. The point of our chapter is to:

detail the emergence of NGOs in education and the main debates around their involvement, and then discuss two extremes: NGOs that have been co-opted by neoliberalism [The PAL Network] and those that actively fight against it [Education International]. The point of presenting extremes is to show the broad scope of education NGOs’ work and discuss the complexity of the contemporary NGO landscape, suggesting not that all NGOs are one or the other but rather that there is a complex spectrum. More fundamentally, the goal of this chapter is to highlight the contradiction within neoliberal capitalism that, on the one hand, people and institutions can reproduce a system unknowingly, while, on the other hand, fighting against global capitalism often means doing so from within the system. We conclude the chapter by questioning the meaning of the public good of education vis-à-vis NGOs and whether it can exist, in new forms, not only within global capitalism but also within the contemporary moment of reactionary nationalism. (p. 285)

I wrote a piece for Norrag about my experiences attending the 2018 Global Education Meeting in early December. These types of international meetings are important for academics studying global education governance. However, for many, it’s simply impossible to gain access. I got in on a press pass, which made sense since I conducted interviews for FreshEd. Since I had access, I decided to write my personal reflections in efforts to make visible parts of the global governance process that often remain hidden.  In other words, I wanted to highlight what Roger Dale would call the politics of education. This is why I included photos and audio from the event; I wanted to give non-conference-goers an inside look at the meeting. There is certainly much more to say about the process of the meeting and its outcomes, which I hope to do in the coming months.

Earlier this month, I was surprised — and humbled — to get an email from the Research Promotion Division  informing me that I received the 2018 Waseda University research award for a high impact publication. This year, the award was given to 14 people across the university. Based on external reviews, here’s what the committee wrote about my work in announcing the award: 

Working within the framework of comparative and international education with a focus on Southeast Asia generally and Cambodia specifically, Dr. Brehm has been studying the complex dynamics between universalism and cultural relativism through issues such as global education governance, historical memory, civil society, and educational privatization. He has been actively engaged in research addressing practical issues related to educational reform as a whole, at the same time ensuring theoretical depth in his work.

Given the scarcity of research on these topics in Southeast Asia, and since this research is setting out to explore areas as yet unexamined, Dr. Brehm’s research profile is original and unique. Many of his research results have been published in high-profile international journals. He also participates in a network of researchers from various countries, centered around the Comparative and International Education Society, and has obtained research grants for joint research projects. His work is widely disseminated and recognized internationally.

Dr. Brehm impacts the field of education beyond his research. Since 2015, he has hosted a weekly podcast called FreshEd. In these open-access shows, he discusses cutting edge research with education scholars around the world. The podcast has been downloaded over 200,000 times. In addition, he collaborates with organizations such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and the Asian Productivity Organization. These activities have substantial scientific impact and create a social ripple effect. 

UPDATE: Here’s a Waseda News article about the award ceremony.